no equations doesn't mean no math. Equations generally do a pretty poor job in explaining things. I'd much rather read an article containing "because acceleration is inversely proportional to mass" than one containing "because F=ma"

That's interesting, I would much rather read "the black body specific intensity is given by B_lambda (T) = (2 h c^2 / lambda^5) / [exp(hc / (lambda * kT)) - 1], where lambda is the wavelength, T is the temperature, c is the speed of light, h is Planck's constant (energy divided by frequency for any particle), kT is the temperature in units of energy, and exp(x) = e^x, than "the black body specific intensity is given by twice Planck's constant times the speed of light squared over the wavelength to the fifth power, all over 1 less than e raised to the Planck's constant times C over the wavelength thermal energy power. There's a reason formulas are the language of mathematics and physics. They are concise, easy to parse, and unambiguous. Contrary to your example, it is easy to see scaling relations without having to add the words for what type of proportionality it is (again, there is a symbol for proportionality that lets you write a simple, easy to understand formula for it). Moreover, you can easily manipulate formulas to show something new. Not so with sentences.

Though I agree with you, you're not giving IE enough credit. If you're behind, you have two choices: stay behind, or get ahead. The latter is preferable. Now, IE might not be ahead of the future releases of Chrome and Firefox (that's a test I like to see) but you can't criticize it for getting better when you don't know how it stacks up to the next releases of other browsers.

Google "hopes to release versions for Mac OS X and Linux by the first half of the year". That's the closest thing TFA gives to a date, and Google hardly promises anything. The summary is somewhat misleading.

I live on a mountain range, and one major reason I didn't get an iPhone until 3G was that the normal Edge signal doesn't reach here. 3G works fine, and I find reception to be much better than my old Verizon phone, where I would have to walk around my office looking for the sweet spot.

I like the iPhone's battery life. Especially desirable is the fact that I can fully charge it during the 15 minutes it's plugged into my car on the way to work every morning.

SkiifGeek writes: "Space.com has reported that the French have identified numerous objects in orbit that do not appear in the ephemeris data reported by the US Space Surveillance Network. Since the US has claimed that if it doesn't appear in the ephemeris data, then it doesn't exist, and the French claim that at least some of the objects have solar arrays, it seems that the French have found secret US satellites.

While the French don't plan to release the information publicly, they are planning to use it as leverage to get the US to suppress reporting of sensitive French satellites in their published ephemeris.

The Graves surveillance radar (the French system) and a comparable German system may form the basis of a pan-European Space Surveillance network — another system that the Europeans don't want to rely on the US for."

An anonymous reader writes: The Guardian is reporting that the Northwest Passage is now navigable due to arctic sea ice melting much faster than previously. This will only continue to get worse next year as the additional open water absorbs more heat and delays the refreezing of the water this winter.

An anonymous reader writes: Sony has been caught out editing the Wikipedia entry for Microsoft's highly anticipated shooter Halo 3.

The original entry stated: 'Halo 3, the third game in the best-selling Xbox game franchise Halo, is a highly anticipated first-person shooter video game under development by Bungie Studios for the Xbox 360 and is expected to "set a new high water mark" for next-generation games.'

However, a sentence had been added which reads: 'Although it won't look any better than Halo 2.

Posted
by
CowboyNeal
on Thursday August 09, 2007 @07:41PM
from the survival-of-the-fittest dept.

talkinsecurity writes "In a public, side-by-side test conducted last night at LinuxWorld, ten antivirus products were confronted with 25 known viruses. The results were surprisingly disparate. Only three of the products caught all of the viruses; three only caught 61 percent, and one caught an abysmal 6 percent. The test, which wasn't particularly complicated, proves that there still are wide differences in the effectiveness of AV tools. A lot of people think all AV tools are the same — they're not!"

1. That I don't have to pay money to get my hands on a credible operating system.
2. There are far more Linux distros available that I have time to try them out.
3. Switching to Linux does not mean trouble-free computing.
4. Whenever you ask a Linux user which is the best distro, invariably the answer you'll get is the name of the distro that they're using.
5. In my opinion, the best Linux distro is Ubuntu.
6. No matter how much I like a GUI, and no matter how lazy years of using Windows made me, there's a lot to be said for using a command line.

Overall it's a very positive Linux article that should inspire others to give Linux a go.

Scientists studying volcanic ridges in the ocean off
Iceland have discovered a new type of volcano. Scientist from the Universities
of Iceland and Hawaii searching southwest of Iceland made the discovery.
Iceland Review has the initial story.

ReadWriteWeb writes: "In this interview with Google's Sep Kamvar, Lead Software Engineer for Personalization at Google, Kamvar responds to concerns about privacy in personalization technologies. He was asked whether privacy is less important now than it used to be — due to the popularity of social networks and social software? To achieve true personalization, do sacrifices need to be made in terms of privacy? Kamvar replied that Google aims to respect user data in the following ways:

1. Choice. Our Web History product is an optional product. Those who don't want it, can opt to not use the product.

2. Transparency. For those users who opt in to the Web History product, we show them their previous queries, so that our users can see all the data that is used to personalize their search results.

3. Control. Our Web History users have the ability to pause Web History at any time, or go back and delete individual items.

4. Data Portability. Our Web History users can export their web history data to another service through an RSS feed.